March 2014

March 31, 2014

Reading the latest report of the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) you are unlikely to say “Damn! We are screwed.” That does not mean “Great! We are not screwed.” In so much as it means living in an inherently unstable system that is Earth is forever hazardous, we always face that danger.

Within the parameters of scientific sobriety, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, has been quoted as saying, “Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change.” For a panel known to grade every contingent scenario with exciting expressions such as “medium evidence, high confidence” or “robust evidence, high agreement”, however, is pretty clear that damaging climate shifts are no longer some future possibility but very much well and truly upon us. The only question is how seriously we as humanity take it and what we do about it.

More than 300 scientists have spent over three years to look a diversity of climate trends to tell us that what they have found should “jolt us into action” as Dr. Pachauri has said.

I substantially read through the summary to the 2600-page report. Since the report is essentially scientific in nature, one is unlikely to find doomsaying to the ever rising beat of drums but taken together there is enough to make us all think what we need to do to arrest a possible slide into self-destruction. Unfortunately, for us the timelines of these shifts are longer term than what we as individuals can really appreciate. It is true that scientists cannot employ alarmist language just for the sake of it to draw attention to these significant changes but there has to be a way to interpret their findings in a manner that grab attention without undermining the quality of the science behind it.

Take this passage for instance: “In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans. Evidence of climate-change impacts is strongest and most comprehensive for natural systems. Some impacts on human systems have also been attributed to climate change, with a major or minor contribution of climate change distinguishable from other influences.” Or this: “In many regions, changing precipitation or melting snow and ice are altering hydrological systems, affecting water resources in terms of quantity and quality (medium confidence). Glaciers continue to shrink almost worldwide due to climate change (high confidence), affecting runoff and water resources downstream (medium confidence). Climate change is causing permafrost warming and thawing in high-latitude regions and in high-elevation regions (high confidence).”

Reading those you are unlikely to go into paranoid pirouettes but they have a direct bearing on your individual life that you will feel much to your chagrin in a daily and personal sense. From heat waves in Europe to massive floods in Pakistan and from wildfires in Australia to severe drought in the United States climate is terribly pervasive if deceptively slow. But make no mistakes it will get under your collar in some form.

Perhaps the seemingly long timelines for destruction are nature’s way of lulling us into complacency before swatting us down as a species. So it is just as well that there are those among us, like the IPCC, that make us aware of the impending problems.

March 30, 2014

My brother Manoj started graying when he had not even reached his teens. He also started wearing prescription glasses around the same time. It is only now, over 40 years later, that age appropriate to the color of his hair is catching up with him. After dying his hair for the better part of the last four decades he has decided to let his natural silvery white shine through. I have been telling him for almost as long as he has been dying his hair not to, well, dye it. I too have been graying since my early 20s but not nearly fast enough for my tastes.

This morning Manoj sent me this picture and I was reminded of an incident, cruelly hilarious at that time and now simply hilarious, that happened to him when he was 12 or 13. He returned from school one day sobbing uncontrollably. A 12-year-old in his nerdy glasses with visible stretches of gray sobbing was a fairly funny sight for me, two years his junior. And then he compounded it by telling our mother—my father had strategically passed away well before that—about why he was crying.

It seems an older man, who was on the bus with him that morning, had teased him by calling him “Kaka”, which in Gujarati is used for older men, although it can also mean uncle. For a 12-year-old to be called “Kaka” would have been brutal. I feel like saying ‘Ouch!’ now. Then, of course, I had laughed because I thought the description was apt with gray hair and glasses. Manoj laughs about it now and is secure enough to stop dying his hair. He asked me this morning of whom his picture reminded me. I said our grandmother and uncle but forgot to mention that his nose is almost exactly like former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav. If Yadav ever needs a nose double, Manoj is willing to offer his services for a reasonable price. If there are hand and leg models, why not nose models?

Since I am writing about Manoj, I might as well plug the castle heritage hotel that he manages for a family in Rajasthan. The Ghanerao castle was built in 1606 and its location offers a uniquely Rajasthani experience. I have not been there but from what Manoj describes it, it seems like an ideal place for a break. Those of you interested in visiting this edge of a preserve hotel should check out the website or contact Manoj Chhaya at reservations@ghanerao.com

P.S.: Speaking of being called “Uncle” the other day a woman, decidedly older and visibly more frail than me, called me “Uncle.” It was so ironic that I let that pass. It appeared to me that by calling me uncle she seemed to regain some of her long lost youth.

March 29, 2014

Barely a year-and-half before India was to become an independent nation in the midst of unprecedented tumult, history making and bloodletting, a 12-year-old boy was dealing with his own personal anger at having been beaten up because of his color.

Living in a “hate-filled” South African society, the 12-year-old Arun had a grandfather to vent his frustration. His name was a certain Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

As one of Gandhi’s grandsons, Arun Gandhi spent over a year-and-half with the great man between late 1945 to the end of 1947 in the shadow of a new country taking birth. The memories of those days and his interactions with Gandhi have taken the form of a children’s book titled ‘Grandfather Gandhi’.

The book, co-authored by Arun Gandhi with Bethany Hegedus and brilliantly illustrated by Evan Turk, captures the reminiscences of those days with the main theme being how a boy turned to his grandfather to deal with his own anger.

Hundreds of its copies, published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, were snapped up in the first few days. Based in Rochester, New York, the 80-year-old Arun Gandhi has had a distinguished career as a journalist, writer, columnist, public speaker and a passionate advocate of non-violence as the most effective tool for political change.

Born in 1934 in Durban, South Africa, Arun Gandhi is the fifth grandson of Gandhi. A part of his official biography says, “Growing up under the discriminatory apartheid laws of South Africa, he was beaten by “white” South Africans for being too black and “black” South Africans for being too white; so, Arun sought eye-for-an-eye justice. However, he learned from his parents and grandparents that justice does not mean revenge, it means transforming the opponent through love and suffering.”

Arun Gandhi answered questions from The Indian Diaspora. Excerpts:

Arun Gandhi

What was a 12-year-old Arun Gandhi angry about?

My anger and frustration came from the experience of living in a hate-filled South African society and being beaten up by whites and then by African Zulus because they disliked the color of my skin. It was humiliating, to say the least, and I wanted revenge, which means fighting back.

How did you take his advice about channeling your anger that he likened to a bolt of lightning?

Grandfather told me that anger is like electricity. It is useful if used intelligently but deadly if abused. So, just as we use electrical energy intelligently for the good of humanity we must learn to use the energy of anger intelligently for the good of humanity. He taught me ways to focus on the problem that generated the anger instead of focusing, as we all do, on the person who acts it out.

Given that your book is gaining a lot of interest, what age of readership, do you think, is most drawn to it?

The book was written for children below ten but all those who have read and reviewed it feel it has a lesson even for adults.

Did Gandhiji appear to you like a regular grandfather or the fact of his stature play into your view of him?

To me, Gandhiji was a regular Grandfather but of course one could not escape his notoriety. Wherever he went there were thousands waiting to catch a glimpse of him. As a little boy, I was often proud of being in the limelight with him but that was a typical reaction of a ‘tweenager’.

The book is about a time in a boy’s age when he might just be becoming aware of the circumstances beyond his own personal life. How aware were you of the enormity of what Gandhiji was involved in?

AG: I was aware of what he was trying to accomplish but being a slow starter I don't think I appreciated it very much.

The time that you talk about is the defining run-up to India’s independence. I presume it was sometime in 1946. How do you think Gandhiji as utterly preoccupied as he was with something historic found time to address a very personal challenge in your life?

Yes, we were with him from late 1945 till end of 1947 and, of course, as you say India was in the throes of being carved up and the resultant turmoil. He was constantly in and out. Sometimes, when he went to places where there was no turmoil he took me along but when he went to Noakhali and Calcutta I stayed back in Sewagram.

He was a master at time management. This is one of the first lessons he taught everyone. He said time is too precious to be wasted. I had to make a time-table of my day and stick to it so that at any time when he asked what were you doing at certain time on a certain day you knew exactly what you were doing. He lived what he wanted us to learn.

From what I have read you seem to have pretty vivid memories and recollections about that period. Would you care to talk about the most enduring impression about your grandfather?

When you live your memories they assume a life of their own. The memories and lessons he taught were enhanced and emphasized by my parents as we grew up.

The most enduring memory is the lesson he taught me about violence. It happened because I threw away a three inch butt of a pencil and he said that was a wasteful act and made me go out and find it and bring it to him. When I did he said even in the making of a simple thing like a pencil we use a lot of the world's natural resources and when we waste them we are indulging in violence against nature.

The second lesson was that because we become wasteful we over-consume the resources of the world and deprive poorer nations of those resources and they have to live in poverty and that is violence against humanity. He made me draw a family tree of violence with two branches - Physical and Passive -- Physical is something we see and experience every day. The kind of violence where physical force is used. Passive is something more insidious and has become so much a part of our nature that often we don't consider it to be violent. Wasting, over-consumption, hating, prejudices, the hundreds and thousands of things that we do every day that causes hurt to some people somewhere.

Making this tree of violence was a form of introspection. Every day I had to put down on that tree all my experiences of the day. This exercise made me aware of how much passive violence we commit all the time every day.

It is passive violence that generates anger in the victim and the victim then resorts to physical violence to get justice or to get what he or she is legitimately denied. So, if peace is our objective, we have to become the change we wish to see in the world.

We are talking barely two years prior to his death. Was there anything in his demeanor that you remember might highlight his personal anguish about the way things were turning out for India?

One thing I learned about him was that when he was satisfied that he had given it his best and yet the result went against his wishes he accepted it democratically. Many wonder why he did not use his moral power to stop partition for instance but he realized that the will of the people and the democratic process superseded his own desires and judgment.

But I recall that earlier in his life he would always talk about wanting to live for 125 years to achieve all the goals he had set for himself. But in the last years he said he was ready to die whenever his time came.

How has the passage of over six decades since your interaction with Gandhiji changed your view of your grandfather?

As I said earlier, I have always been a slow learner and so as I matured I began to appreciate and understand a great deal of his philosophy. The one thing that impacted me the most is when he told a western journalist: The people of India will follow me in life, worship me in death but not make my cause their cause. These are words that could have been uttered by anyone of the great people we worship today. We have interpreted his philosophy dogmatically and then rejected it as inapplicable in modern times. But a philosophy can only be as alive and meaningful as the interpreter is sincere and truthful.

March 28, 2014

Dreams have no back stories or no reference to the context. They always start in the middle of something; some event that the dreamer struggles to make sense of within the surprisingly short-lived experience.

I am trying to make sense of the one I had after 5 a.m. I know the specific time because like I all normally do, I woke up at 5 a.m. to face the impending vagaries. Rather than getting out of bed I decided to sleep some more. By the time I woke up again it was 6.17. Between 5 and 6.17 I am fairly certain that the dream would have lasted only a couple of minutes but it was so well laid out.

If only there was some way of mastering the craft that dreams have of telling fantastically vivid, often disturbingly bizarre, achingly funny, visually stunning and richly detailed stories in just a few seconds or minutes.

The one I was part of this morning had my character—with no names or back stories—going to a bus despot to catch a bus for a vaguely named town. I forget to buy a ticket and wait for the bus to arrive. Then suddenly, having realized that I had no ticket, I go to the window and discover a long line. I remember the bus depot, the throngs of passengers, the body smells very well. The passengers generally had the expressions that passengers everywhere have—getting fast to wherever they want to get. They were jostling about as if doing that would shorten their actual journey.

For reasons I don’t know my first attempt at getting a ticket faded out of the dream and came another one where I am walking behind a boyish man lugging what feels like two very heavy camera equipment bags—the kind made of aluminum but with a bottle green coating of some hardy plastic. Empathizing with his plight I took one of the suitcases for him. He was so tired of carrying both that when he said thank you to me no word came out of his mouth. But I understood. As he regained some strength I asked, “Whereto?” To which he said, “Of course…..” Of course trails off because he did say the name of the place he was going to but I do not remember the name but know that I was also going to the same place. The way he said “Of course” it was as if why ask such an obvious question because everyone in that dream world went to just one place—that vaguely named town.

It turned out that he was a news cameraman on an assignment. When he mentioned that it also struck me that I too was a journalist. On the way to the ticket window he decided to stop by at what was a press club that looked like a dilapidated barbershop. He put on a white coat and told me that journalists were given that white coat so that people knew who they were. Why the white coat? I don’t know. I asked him if I could get one and he replied it was a long story why I couldn’t. When I suggested that we should get in the line if we were to get our tickets for the next bus leaving for the vaguely named town, he said being journalists our tickets will be delivered at the press club at 8 p.m. But I said I was not a member of the club and I had no white coat. That’s when he decided to wait in the line with me.

As we returned to the bus depot for some reason the ground had turned completely muddy. It was no ordinary mud but deep dark blackish brown mud that could trap you like quicksand. Again for reasons I don’t understand my character was in a white pajama, sleeveless vest and no shoes and no luggage either.

Just as we reach the ticket counter the ticket clerk says the bus was sold out and there was no more bus that evening. That’s when my real problem began. My boyish man acquaintance began disintegrating and suddenly faded away. My last question to him was “How much would a taxi ride (to the vaguely named town) cost?” He said 15,000. Note how no currency was specified. There was no ethnographic or geographic or monetary specificity to the dream at all. Suddenly, he was gone and I was left to fend for myself in my pajama and vest and no shoes. I had presumably lost all my belongings, including money and passport, or left them a the press club. I started walking in one particular direction for no particular reason. I was suddenly confronted with a landscape which was both muddy and littered with uniformly shaped turd everywhere. Yes, literally turd. It was as if someone had copy-pasted the same coiled up turd. I walked through that landscape looking lost and much to the amusement of others.

Finally, I reach what could only be called some sort of a town center where all buildings had been plastered with purplish-rusty corrugated metal sheets. At one point I stopped walking but the town kept revolving past me. It had the weird post-apocalyptic beauty. The haze turned increasingly purple but I smelled mostly sulfurous. That’s when I was woken up. The time was 6.17 a.m. When I got out of my bed, I felt somewhat unsteady.

March 27, 2014

I am a sucker for utterly useless coincidences. I have had my share of those. One happened between this morning and last Saturday.

Flipping through the channels on my TV, I settled a bit on an episode of House Hunters International on HGTV about an inflight director called Jada wanting to settle down in Gaborone, Botswana. Botswana is a lovely country blessed with some great natural beauty. I was thinking to myself what it would be like to live in Gaborone. I left it at that. That was the first half of this coincidence.

The second half of the coincidence happened this morning when I was checking the kind of visitors to this blog on the right hand bar. I was struck by one from Gaborone, Botswana. (Number 6 on the list above). What are the odds that you chance upon a place on television and then, a few days later, you have a visitor from that very place on your blog? It seems they are fairly high going by this coincidence.

Of course, the visitor from Gaborone was looking for “Padma Lakshmi body”, Padma Lakshmi being a model turned TV host and formerly wife of the author Salman Rushdie. People looking for Padma Lakshmi for entirely lascivious reasons end up on this blog because I had done a couple of posts in 2009 about her highly suggestive commercial Hardee’s and a nude photo shot she did for Allure magazine, both in quick succession in March and April of 2007.

Look at all the dots which eventually connect here. The coincidence begins with my watching House Hunters International from Gaborone, Botswana and some resident there looking for “padma lakshmi body”. And we have this utterly useless post, which is just as well as because I have a routine visit from a killer migraine for the last couple of days.

March 26, 2014

I did this digital painting originally for Higgs-boson but it works here as well (Illustration by MC)

My decades-long effort to get a handle on some aspects of quantum physics has essentially become leaping from one failure to the next. Just as I think I have begun to understand a concept it ceases to make sense.

I understand quantum physics philosophically but it is the science of it that eludes me. In my younger days I used to curse under my breath every time I would run into a theory that I did not comprehend. There were days when I would curse in infinite loops of invectives. With age one gets amused by one’s intellectual inadequacies. My current sadomasochistic endeavor is to get some measure of quantum gravity, which is supposed to be the physics for the 21st century just as quantum physics was for the last century.

Yesterday, I posted a nerdy Facebook update saying “Trying to get a handle on quantized gravity” and intend writing a “short piece” about it today. Friend, fellow journalist and fellow nerd Kajal Basu declared with obvious disbelief, “A SHORT piece on quantum gravity? Whoa! After you finish, tell me how it's done”. He did suspect that that I would take refuge in “la philosophie cynique”. He is not that off the mark because those who don’t comprehend pure physics, philosophize. It is a cop out and I would be the first one to concede it. That said even philosophizing requires at least some peripheral understanding of the subject one is philosophizing about.

The first point I must bear in mind is the “quantizing gravity” does not mean what I would like it to mean, namely that you atomize gravity, bottle it and spray it around. Not as a cologne or perfume but as actual gravity. The idea is that you can make gravity potable and distribute it in whatever measure you want. Imagine going into any corner of the universe with bottled gravity and turning it upside down by altering its gravitational balance by spraying gravity. I don’t know about you but to me it sounds cool.

Coming back to the serious side of quantum gravity, it is now believed that the discovery of primordial gravitational waves means gravity is indeed quantized. Quantize means gravity now has discrete observable value. I hope I am getting this right. In reading a lot of material about this subject I did not come across anything that answered the elementary question—What is quantized gravity? Sure, there are many complex explanation with scientific language and equations that destroy your confidence in yourself.

From what I understand (and I understand very little) gravity has so far stood apart as a force in the classical sense of the word unlike other forces such as electromagnetism which can be seen from the standpoint of quantum physics. There are two main theories of the 20th century physics—quantum theory and Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Quantum theory deals with the microscopic parts of nature such as electrons and photons and how they interact with each other. General relativity describes the force of gravity that controls the macro, the vast bodies in the universe such as planets, stars, galaxies and so on and how they interact with each other. For close to a century physicists have struggled to fuse these two theories that work perfectly well within their respective realms but collide when they come together. The main reason why they collide is because gravity has not been quantized or, in other words, not seen from the standpoint of particles. There has been a longstanding speculation about a particle called graviton which essentially carries the force of gravity. This is a massless particle and hence its range is limitless.

The detection of the primordial gravitational waves indicates gravitons because we have detected those waves some 13.8 billion years after they were generated during the putative Big Bang. It is believed that with this discovery the quest to fuse quantum theory and theory of general relativity has gained tremendous momentum.

I see such high science as the world’s most exclusive club where bouncers are invisible but very much present, checking for a level of intelligence to let you inside where a bizarre world unfolds to the accompaniment of cosmic rhythm and dance. I have been waiting for nearly four decades for entry. So far I have ended up with a kick up my pants. So while I wait, I try and formulate quanta of gravity and bottle them.

March 25, 2014

I had primed myself to write this morning about quantum gravity and quantized gravity mainly to illustrate my near total incomprehension. But gravity has been upended by the passing of Nanda, a beloved actor-star of Hindi cinema. Nanda passed away in Mumbai at the age 75 of a heart attack.

Since the prime of Nanda’s movie career coincided with my early and late teenage, quite like many other Hindi cinema actresses, my recollection of her brings a spontaneous smile. That is perhaps the best way to remember anyone, particularly a woman.

Born to virtual cinema royalty (Her father was the Marathi actor and director Master Vinayak and uncle, the filmmaker V. Shantaram) Nanda began her career as a child star but it was in Shantaram’s 1956 film ‘Toofan aur Diya” that she emerged as an adult actor . In a career spanning over 25 years Nanda was paired with the biggest male actors of her time. She worked with Dev Anand, Ashok Kumar, Kishore Kumar, Manoj Kumar, Shashi Kapoor and Rajesh Khanna among others.

Having grown up on the movie sets, Nanda had a natural ease with the camera. Her career came in the midst of the success of other huge names of Hindi cinema such as Waheeda Rehman, Asha Parekh, Mala Sinha, and Sadhna. She made quite a niche for herself within that starscape. My personal memory of Nanda is dominated by her 1965 film ‘Jab Jab Phool Khile’. Although I was 4 then, as it frequently happened in those days of poor access to entertainment, I saw the film much later in my early teens. Her song ‘Yeh sama’ (Click the link to the photo above because for some inexplicable reason I am unable to embed YouTube video on this damn blog any more) remains one of my all time favorites. Apart from the lovely composition by Kalyanji Anandji, I am pretty sure the sight of Nanda swaying in her satin white dress had something to do with why a teenager would remember this.

Notwithstanding the histrionic requirements of the era, which often meant overwrought and shrieky emotionalism, Nanda managed to hold her own. She was eminently watchable in ‘Hum Dono’, he 1961 film with Dev Anand. Check out this clip. Cue at 5.02 onward as Anand, playing a flamboyant army major who comes home and wants to spend a few moments of intimacy with her before he gets deployed.

She clearly had a lot to offer when she decided to withdraw in 1994 after the death of the well-known filmmaker Manmohan Desai, with whom she was engaged. It is only in death that the self-absorbed fraternity of movie stars discover body of work of others. That is happening now. Here is to Nanda.

March 24, 2014

There are three stages of humiliation—injury, irony and inurement. (I just made those up). Jaswant Singh is swinging between the three after having been left with no choice by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) but to go his own way. His decision to contest as an independent candidate from the Barmer parliamentary constituency in Rajasthan is a clear rebuff to the party leadership. In the civilized circles where I move around, I would describe Singh’s action as him telling his party “Up yours.”

Yesterday, I called the Singh problem a sideshow that is so common to all national elections in India and to all parties. I return to it today because sideshows have a way of illuminating the larger malaise of claiming political privileges in perpetuity.

It is as much the BJP’s right to nominate whomever it wants from wherever it wants just as it is equally Singh’s right to contest from anywhere as an independent candidate. Both have exercised their democratic choice. Those principles are not under question at all. What is under question is whether a time must come in a politician’s career when they must call it a day. At 76, that question should cross Singh’s mind but it wouldn’t because politicians are loath to retire. They would try to contest even if there was less than one percent chance of winning an election. Of course, in Singh’s case the prospects are much higher. I am not entirely convinced whether there should be a term limit for politicians because like wine – which I have never drunk in my life—they seem to get better with age. When I say better, I mean it from the standpoint of an outside observer like me in search of free amusement.

Watching parts of Singh’s news conference to signal his rebellion he came across as a striking character for a highly politically charged novel. He thinks his party has been overrun (my characterization) by all manners of people who had nothing to do with its core philosophy. I wonder whom he was pointing at because if he meant its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, he would be factually inaccurate. Modi is currently the embodiment of the party’s thinking and mood just as Singh’s mentor and former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was during his time. In many ways, what stood between Singh and the party was Vajpayee because he genuinely liked him and thought highly of him despite his moderation. I think Singh reminded Vajpayee of himself.

The BJP in its current avatar reminds me of the Republican Party in the United States in recent years when it has been taken over by the ultra right wing groups in a way that those Republicans who might have sounded radical sometime ago now sound reasonable in comparison to the new elements. When Singh speaks of the BJP losing its core personality he is referring to the rise of those with an unambiguously right wing agenda. I have never understood why he has chosen to keep alive his association with the party as long as he has since the party of his imagination has always been that—a party of his imagination.

The current hardship within the party for leaders such as L K Advani, Jaswant Singh and Sushma Swaraj (Under different circumstances the last name could have been its prime ministerial contender) is symptomatic of the ferment inside it. It is unquestionable that Modi is calling the shots using the party president, Rajnath Singh as his proxy. Unless the BJP under Modi manages to win even a simple majority, it will come face to face with the sobering realities of coalition politics. It will be forced to moderate its positions on every national issue. In any case, electoral politics in India can be ideological only in a very limited sense. There is the ideology and then there is the mammoth of sociocultural and economic realities. In that contest, the latter always wins. So even if Modi’s BJP wins every seat in parliament, it will still be up against that mammoth called demographic reality. There is just no escaping that.

March 23, 2014

As it happens before all parliamentary elections in India with all major political parties, sideshows abound in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as well. Sulking and pouting are the preferred means of protest for leaders who do no get their way—their way in this case would be a nomination from a constituency of their choice. One such sideshow is Jaswant Singh of the BJP.

First, it was the BJP patriarch Lal Krishna Advani who let his displeasure be known to the new brass-knuckle way of doing things under Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate. He sulked and looked sullen for a few days at reportedly being denied his wish to contest from Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh rather than Gandhinagar in Gujarat but eventually yielded. He may yet be plotting something depending on the post-election dynamic.

Then there is Jaswant Singh, the nuancer*-in-chief in the BJP. (*Nuancer is not a word but coined here for the purpose). The 76-year-old Singh, with pronounced scholastic propensities, sees everything in nuances. In contrast, Modi, coming from a predominantly mercantile/industrial state, does not do nuance very well. I had in my December 20, 2012 post said this (Rather memorably, I thought) after Modi won the state assembly elections for the third consecutive term: “It is greatly amusing to see 24/7 English television broadcasters in New Delhi looking for nuance in the results of the Gujarat state assembly elections. As a native of that state I must urgently ask them to stop looking. Nuance is sold by the kilo across my home state. In Ahmedabad, its biggest city where I was born and raised, if you buy a kilo of nuance you get two kilos free. Sometimes driving past a fafda-jalebi shop you may see a sign that says, “Nuance is bad for your health.” My point is, as it has always been, the mercantile community anywhere does not go for nuance, especially the one in Gujarat where its cultural roots are mercantile.”

Modi instinctively views with suspicion and derision anyone who tries to nuance life. In an case, Singh has always come across as a bit of an interloper, with his detached liberalism and scholarly affectations, in a party that detests either. He was expelled in 2005 after he published his book "Jinnah: India - Partition - Independence", in which he demonstrated the temerity to be an impartial historian and not a party demagogue while dealing with a figure like Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan who remains toxic for the hardcore base of the BJP.

I had done a news analysis for the IANS wire after Singh’s expulsion. If memory serves, he had welled up even then like he did the other day talking about his continuing predicament related to his nomination from the Barmer constituency in Rajasthan now. This is what I wrote then: (I like the way I fish out references of my own with such smug efficiency): “It is tempting to describe Jaswant Singh's unceremonious expulsion from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a glaring example of the culture of intolerance of independence of thought that runs through India's political class. In reality, it is merely one political party's inability to define itself.

During his news conference Singh repeatedly mentioned his 30-year-long association with the party. While Singh may have been with the party for all of those 30 years, it is hardly clear whether the party was with him in those decades. His rise in the party leadership as well as cabinet positions notwithstanding, Singh always came across as an outsider looking in and not an insider looking out. In a sense, he managed this dichotomy much less successfully than his more illustrious mentor Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He may have been removed from the party only now but he was never really fully in it.

The fact that he had no allegiance to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological forebear of the BJP, always created wariness among the more doctrinaire members of the party. As long as Vajpayee was the decisive figure Singh's detached moderation was tolerated by the others. With Vajpayee retired it was only a matter of time before the hardliners struck against Singh.

What made the expulsion an easy fait accompli for the BJP's parliamentary board was the publication of the book "Jinnah: India - Partition - Independence", in which Singh demonstrates the temerity to be an impartial historian and not a party demagogue. If there ever was a perfect excuse to remove someone from the BJP, it would be to fairly assess Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Lal Krishna Advani tempted fate by doing so once but escaped retribution because of his RSS roots. There was no way Singh could have survived in the aftermath of the book.”

Notwithstanding all that, Singh did come back to the party even though the party’s collective response could be summed up as “Meh.” Now that there is again some noise about him leaving it over the leadership’s decision to deny him nomination from Barmer, I must tell him that the party is just not that into you. At 76 and with his intellectually loaded harrumphs, Modi and his lackeys see no merit or consequence to Singh. The former foreign minister of India may choose to make a distinction between the “real BJP” and the “fake BJP” but the fact is that for now and perhaps for the foreseeable future there is only one BJP and that is Modi’s. I say all this not in endorsement but merely as a matter of fact. It is what it is. Singh should either have the gumption to take Modi head on and challenge him as he goes about upending the old order or leave and never return. I understand that it is painful be a spent force, firing empties. But we all come to such a sorry pass in life. The wisdom is in taking the correct turn.